Taylor Swift is keeping her fans fed with new music — the pop star confirmed that her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, is coming out on April 19.
Swift announced the release during the award for Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2024 Grammys on Sunday, February 4, in celebration of her 13th win at the annual awards show.
“[The way I can celebrate] is by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the past two years, which is that my brand new album comes out April 19th,” she told the crowd. “It’s called The Tortured Poets Department and I’m going to go post the cover right now backstage.”
The singer then took to Instagram to share the artwork for the record, which features her lying in a bed with black lingerie.
“And so I enter into evidence my tarnished coat of arms,” she wrote above the photo. “My muses acquired like bruises, my talismans and charms. The tick, tick, tick of love bombs. My view of pitch-black ink. All’s fair in love and poetry … Sincerely, The Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department.”
Swift, 33, sparked new speculation about TS11 while celebrating her song “Cruel Summer” reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in October. In a series of photos shared via Instagram, Swift held up one finger while her cowriter Jack Antonoff expressed his excitement by angling his hands with all 10 fingers showing. Fans considered their gestures to be an Easter egg for Swift’s 11th album.
Still, some Swifties insisted at the time that the singer would not release a new record until her Eras Tour — which covers her career up until her 2022 album, Midnights — concluded in November 2024.
“I personally don’t think we’re getting TS11 until after the Eras Tour is done,” one fan wrote via Twitter. “Introducing a new album would disrupt the world the Eras Tour is based on: adding TS11 to the set list would mean cutting stuff, changing the Lover house, etc, and leaving it out would be strange.”
Swift has become known for dropping new music at unexpected times, though. In July 2020, she announced her eighth album, Folklore, just hours before its release. She followed the same pattern that December when her ninth album, Evermore, came out shortly after confirming its existence. Swift’s most recent album, Midnights, followed a more typical release model, as she shared during her appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards in August 2022 that her 10th record would debut that October.
Since 2019, Swift has released a jaw-dropping eight albums, including her rerecordings of the projects she lost amid her masters dispute with Scooter Braun. After dropping Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) in April 2021 and November 2021, respectively, she had fun with the announcements for Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Swift revealed during a May concert in Nashville that the rerecording of her third studio album would come out in July, while she unveiled brand-new blue costumes during her final Los Angeles show in August to tease her rerecording of 1989, which dropped in October.
Swift marked the deluge of new material with her monumental Eras Tour, which kicked off in Arizona in March nearly five years after her Reputation Stadium Tour ended. The international leg began in Mexico in August and will conclude in Canada in November 2024.
